Bruce Almighty (2003)

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I remember as a high-school student asking my
father, "If you had to pick somebody other than God to be God,
who would you pick?"

I expected him to name some very holy person, some personal
hero or great saint. Instead, after a moment’s reflection, he
replied thoughtfully, "I would pick a genocidal nihilist who
would instantly obliterate all existence."

Caveat Spectator

Theologically speaking, the question was absurd and
meaningless; but the answer, I think, contained profound insight.
God is both the source and the goal of our being, the meaning as
well as the master of our lives. Imagine reality without God, and
life becomes meaningless; imagine divine omnipotence at the
disposal of anything other than divine love, and existence
becomes infinite horror.

In Bruce Almighty, God hands over his power to Jim
Carrey, who is not a great saint but a shallow, selfish-centered
jerk named Bruce. Instead of anything like infinite horror,
though, the world bumps along more or less as usual, with no
worse consequences than some flooding and minor rioting.

In fairness, despite the fact that God says he’s "going on
vacation," there are intimations that he hasn’t really turned
everything over to Bruce. But this is really rather a
cheat. Bruce turns out to be not very good in the
prayer-answering department, mainly because God hasn’t
sufficiently expanded his consciousness (forget about
omniscience) to deal with the large number of prayers that come
his way. According to Catholic belief, even the saints in heaven
can do that! If God gives you more responsibility than he
does power, what does it prove if you can’t do the job?

Of course Bruce Almighty is a Hollywood comedy, not
The Divine Comedy. We’re not looking for anything
approaching theological precision here. Theologians and
apologists could explain why the whole concept of God endowing a
creature with all his power (the movie speaks of all his
"powers," as if he were a superhero) is self-contradictory and
meaningless, and why Bruce Almighty obviously doesn’t have the
power even of a heavyweight angel, let alone the Ancient of Days.
But hey, it’s just a movie — a lightweight comic parable about
letting God be God and trying to make a difference. Lighten
up.

Right. Fine. I’m willing to give the movie its premise. And on
the whole I don’t mind its depiction of God as a dignified,
humorous Morgan Freeman. (Of course God is black; look at all his
servants and messengers and so forth — Djimon Hounsou in The Four Feathers, Will Smith
in The Legend of Bagger Vance, Don Cheadle in The Family Man, Michael Clarke Duncan
in The Green Mile, Whoopi
Goldberg in Ghost, even Freeman himself in Robin Hood:
Prince of Thieves.)

Undoubtedly some Christians will enjoy Bruce Almighty,
in part simply for its subject matter. Despite a recent bubble of
religious themes at the movies, it’s still relatively unusual for
Hollywood to treat God and prayer and so forth without open
mockery, and Christian moviegoers may be so hungry for it that
they’ll take what they can get whether the movie is good, bad, or
indifferent, and even whether the treatment of religious themes
is commendable or iffy.

And Bruce Almighty does have some good intentions. It
takes seriously the idea of surrendering to God’s will. It
depicts prayer as commendable, while debunking self-centered
prayers. It also critiques the sort of passive fatalism that sits
around blaming God rather than taking action to change
things.

Yet the movie goes to the opposite extreme from passive
fatalism by suggesting that we need to look to ourselves and
not to God. In one key scene Bruce watches as God climbs a
stairway (or a ladder) to heaven, leaving him behind. "But what
if I need you? What if I need help?" Bruce calls after the
Almighty.

My first thought was that God would say something like "I’ll
always be with you" (there are precedents). Then, when I
remembered that God still had the "prayer beads" Bruce had thrown
away earlier in the film, I expected God to drop the beads down
to Bruce, as much to say, "If you need my help, try praying."

In other words, stop "looking up." Stop looking to God. Look
to yourself instead. "Don’t pray for a miracle," the movie
emphasizes in so many words: "Be the miracle." Make a
difference. Give blood. Take the high road. Care about people.
Forgive. Be satisfied with what you have.

Oh. Is that what we’d be doing, if only we’d stop
"looking up."

Bruce Almighty argues that we can’t be God, but
it doesn’t seem to understand how we need God. There’s a
lot about prayer, and the movie agrees that it’s good to pray,
but it doesn’t have much interest in what good it is — why
prayer matters. There are gestures in the direction of why God
can’t just grant everybody’s prayers, but little insight into why
God might want us to pray in the first place.

Part of the problem, of course, is that the movie conceives of
prayer exclusively in a petitionary mode, in terms what we
ask of God — as opposed to, say, prayers of worship or
adoration, or even thanksgiving or repentance. Sometimes the
prayers are selfish, sometimes selfless, but always people
pray only to ask God for help.

The idea that one might ever have anything to say to God that
didn’t involve what we want or need at the moment — that,
in a word, it might be both possible and desirable to pursue a
relationship with one’s Maker — has no place here. The
movie touches on belief in God, even trust in God, but it hasn’t
got a clue about faith.

Part and parcel of this is the typical movie picture of God as
a deity who wants us to be good and happy, but is nothing
remotely like the object and goal of our being, our holy
obsession, our life and our all. He’s a sort of kindly manager or
superintendent — just the sort of deity you might happen to pray
to when you want something, but would never think of turning to
just to spend time with him, or to ask forgiveness for your
sins.

Speaking of sins, that’s another notion that’s pretty much
absent from the film. In this day and age, it’s hardly surprising
to find that, for instance, the hero and the heroine are
cohabitating outside of wedlock. (I was a bit surprised at
the way the movie apparently takes this fact for granted during
the first half of the film, while, for example, Grace sits
working on their photo albums.) But I can’t help noticing that,
despite Bruce being cross-examined by God on several occasions,
there’s never any slightest hint that the Almighty might have a
preference for marriage over cohabitation.

I was reminded of Kevin Smith’s Dogma, a film with many faults that
nevertheless managed to cast aspersions on a whole litany of sins
including idolatry, adultery, suicide, cheating on taxes, and
neglecting the needs of one’s elderly parents. Bruce
Almighty is a much safer, less provocative film, yet here God
seems basically concerned that people be unselfish and positive
and pro-active and so forth.

All of this might go down easier if Carrey and director Tom
Shadyac (Dragonfly, Patch
Adams) weren’t so determined to set their sights equally low
in every other respect. Bruce Almighty is excessively
preoccupied with nose-picking and dog urination (one of Bruce’s
triumphant "be-the-miracle" moments is when he finally trains his
dog to pee on the grass instead of on the furniture). In the
film’s lowest gag, Bruce uses his powers to make a monkey appear
out of a man’s butt (à la the camel and the
needle’s eye, I suppose) — then, as the man struggles to get
away, the monkey forces his way back in again. Yuck.

Yes, in addition to its theological faults, Bruce
Almighty isn’t very funny or creative (though there are
scattered funny scenes). I could write a whole review on the
film’s artistic failings, but lots of critics will be doing that,
and the world doesn’t need another artistic deconstruction of
another Tom Shadyac film. It probably doesn’t need a theological
deconstruction of one either, but if I have to spend my time
doing one or the other, I choose to write about the movie’s
theological failings. That’s what you really wanted to read
about, wasn’t it?